Monthly Archives: April 2012

The Big Bang Fair, a big science and engineering event for schoolkids was held in Birmingham last month. Led by Engineering UK and supported by various government departments, charities, learned societies and businesses, it’s an annual event that’s been going for a while. They seem to have taken down the list of 2012 sponsors, but you can see a list of the 2011 ones in this leaflet (pdf), which included BAE Systems, Shell, EDF Energy and Sellafield Ltd.

Anne Schulthess from CND happened to be at another education show in Birmingham that week and spotting the Big Bang, dropped in. She shared some photos, noting “basically it’s the arms fair for children. With a bit of environmental destruction thrown in for good measure”. Back in 2009, Scientists for Global Responsibility and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade condemned BAE’s role in the event (SGR/CAAT press release, reproduced on my old blog). I’d be tempted to suggest one of these groups try to set up a stall at the fair next year but even if Engineering UK let them, the £20,000 to £100,000 pricetag might well be out of the budget of a small NGO.

Industrial involvement in science education is nothing new. Take, for example, these adverts I found in some old copies of the National Association for Environmental Education’s magazine (c. 1978):

The Science Museum have a fair bit of history here: from the BNFL sponsored atomic gallery in the 1980s to Shell sponsorship of their climate gallery in 2010 (see also this 2008 freedom of information request on Shell and BP funding). I used to work on their Energy gallery, and it’d be depressing to watch visitors clock the BP logo, laugh and walk away.

I worry when I see reports that the Smithsonian were so pleased to have secured a sponsor that was ok with the idea of evolution that they let a bit of not very scientific attitude to climate change in (e.g. see ThinkProgress, 2010). I also worry when I hear about teaching resources designed to stress the uncertainty of climate change (e.g. see Guardian, 2012). I can see why groups like Liberate Tate focus on the corporate sponsorship of art and Greenpeace scale the National Gallery, but I worry slightly more about the involvement of the oil industry in exhibitions where their work is an actual topic in the content.

We should be careful of simply assuming corporate sponsorship means they have influence on content. Science Museum staff claim editorial independence from any of their sponsors. Just as, I noticed, the Guardian stresses Greenpeace had no say over editorial content of John Vidal’s report on industrial fishing in West Africa, even though the NGO paid his travel costs to Senegal. We should also recognise that there is a lot of scientific expertise in industry, just as Greenpeace give Vidal access to places he wouldn’t otherwise see. Science isn’t just a matter of what goes on in ivory towers, so perhaps it’s only right that such groups involved. Plus, seeing as people don’t seem to want to pay fees or taxes for publicly funded science communication, maybe it’s only sensible the Science Museum et al ask groups who’ve made a lot of money out of science and technology give something back. We can’t just rely on moneybags of the Wellcome Trust (which has its own complex economic history anyway).

As I’ve argued before, if businesses are going to have involvement in science education, I want to see what they think, warts and all. If groups like the Science Museum really have editorial control, they should take industrial sponsorship only if the company involved will also (a) give them their expertise, and (b) be happy for said expertise to be put under some scrutiny. Rather than retreat behind claims to scientific objectivity, science communication should wear it’s political fights on its sleeve, show science’s various institutional connections for what they really are. These sorts of debates are part of science in society and should be offered up and opened up for broader public discussion, appreciation and scrutiny.

I’ve worked with a load of instituions in science communication, from Girl Guiding UK to the Royal Society, with a fair bit of industrial sponsorship thrown in at times too. This included stints at CND, Mind and the Science Museum while I was still in my teens. For that reason, I don’t think we should be scared about opening up debate on the politics of science at educational events aimed at schoolkids like the Big Bang Fair. I coped with these issues and think others can too. We should show them BAE, but make sure they get a group like SGR along to help offer other sides too. We should trust young people more when it comes to the messiness of science in society.

As it’s Easter Sunday and friends and family are at Church, I dug out a piece on the idea of an atheist temple I wrote it for Comment Is Free belief a few months back (but got bumped by coverage of women Bishops). The photos are of the Occupy Camp by St Pauls before it was disbanded earlier this year.

Several eyes rolled at Alain de Botton’s suggestion of a ‘temple to atheism’. For me, it was the Rev Katharine Rumens, rector of a church near where the temple might be built, who put her finger on the problem. Rumens worries that the sense of awe de Botton wants to invoke is not enough. Indeed, it might alienate people, make them feel insignificant even. A temple needs to be welcoming.

This is a concern we can apply to de Botton’s temple, but could be extended to anything trying to invoke a bit of awe: be it a popular science book, painting, train station or shopping centre. The politics depend on what you are asked to be in awe of. A God or a Bishop is different from a galaxy, a glacier, a spaceship or a giant tree. Awe of scientists, engineers or explorers who make and uncover our world is different again. There is always a politics though. Awe can make people feel slightly rubbish in comparison, and I don’t think that’s a nice thing to do to someone.

London’s Natural History Museum – an iconic “Cathedral to Nature” established in 1881 – provides a neat case study. Being in awe of nature itself is, perhaps, no bad thing. Perhaps we should feel an emotional connection with nature. Especially in the context of climate change, maybe we should appreciate nature’s beauty more and feel increasingly scared by it too. But the NHM doesn’t just showcase nature; it is a celebration of human understanding too, from statues of dead scientists to the fishbowl-like Darwin Centre, where glass walled laboratories mean you can watch live ones going about their work. These people, what they know and continue to reveal about our world, impress me. But I don’t want to be cowed by them.

There’s a difference between a temple that invites you to gasp open-mouthed, and one that invites you in for a cup of tea. I was talking to a friend recently about how the Occupy camp has changed the way we feel about St Paul’s. It used to be just another posh building on the skyline. Now it feels newly iconic in a way we feel a connection to. It’s not just for people in history books, or those with the religion or cash we lack. Now we feel we can drop by the space around the Cathedral, if not the site itself, for a chat. The first time I ever understood why people construct large religious buildings was a schooltrip to the Shri Swaminarayan Mandir. It’s a space of such grand, eye-watering beauty it’s hard not to feel humbled. It is also, importantly, a very welcoming and human space, perhaps because it was built by the local community and a sense of personal connection is so clear.

At its best, the NHM asks the public not just to be entranced and educated, but join in. It invites us to gawp at our world and gain perspective by tracing both the Earth’s history and our scientific understanding of it, but it also invites us to join an ongoing social activity of learning more. The NHM, for all its impressive halls and awesome dinosaurs, can also be humble and listen. Projects like Open Air Laboratories offer science to be part of.

If de Botton wants to build a temple to atheism, good luck to him. I just hope it’s a place where a diversity of people feel able to work together to discuss options for a shared future, not simply sit in awe of a world they’ve been given. At their best, religious sites provide this. I’d hope any atheist one would too.

Last month, I chaired a debate at the Royal Institution exploring the different expectations scientists and journalists have for science media. I was asked to write up my notes for the Guardian science blog, and picked out three questions from the many we discussed on the night.

1. Is climate change a qualitatively different issue from more general questions about science in the media? Any area of science is different from another: we should be careful of talking about science as if it were a cohesive whole, just as we should be careful of lumping together the whole of ‘the media’ too. Still, I think there is a lot to be said for taking time to consider what it is precisely about climate science that distinguishes it. As Joe Smith argued recently, the topic is rather a hard sell for the media: “Climate change science is looking at the long term, slow moving, run through with uncertainty and is […] at least for the foreseeable future, unfinishable. It represents one of the most ambitious intellectual projects of our time. It is our moonshot.” I’d add that it’s also a young science in many ways, it doesn’t have the same sort of political and cultural infrastructure of quantum physics or human genetics. You’d probably have to be in your early 30s or younger to have done much climate science at school. In a more cynical mode, I’d also posit the suggestion that climate change, unlike other science media issues like GMOs, nanotech or BSE, isn’t about selling us products – quite the opposite, arguably – and that might explain a certain lack of political will when it comes to supporting public communications work.

2. How do we ensure science news is reported in the public interest? I was pleased to hear the topic of the public interest raised, and it’s a topical one in the UK as we consider a possible replacement for our Press Complaints Commission (e.g. see the Wellcome/CRUK submission to Leveson, pdf). Still, I worried that the discussion of the public seemed to end here. I wanted to hear more about opening up science media to involve audiences, a sense of the public as a resource not simply an audience to be protected and looked after. Such work doesn’t have to be a matter of ignoring scientific or journalistic professional expertise and skills, just doing things in public to open the conversation a bit (Leo Hickman’s EcoAudit is a lovely example of this).

3. Should journalists read the scientific papers they write about? This question had caused a fair bit of fuss on the night, and was later explored in detail in a great post from James Randerson. I couldn’t help but think it was a bit of a distraction though: it’s the notion of a scientific paper that’s the problem, not journalists. A paper really isn’t the most efficient way of sharing scholarship, is it? I’m slightly cynical change here is possible, I suspect the publishing industry is too powerful for meaningful change.

(I admit I was in a rather cynical mood that night)

Overall, I left the event at the RI, not for the first time, worried that if we leave science media to commercial intersets that surround science rather than paying for a newspaper, museum exhibition or public funding via taxes, then too much of the public debate on these issues end up bankrolled by those with an interest in selling us stuff. Advertisers. Sponsors. Tobacco. Oil. Supermarkets. The arms trade. Science that doesn’t sell us stuff – or tells us not to buy – gets quietened. I don’t want to suggest that if commercial interests are involved in science communication the work becomes somehow invalid (I’ve worked on sponsored science communication myself) but it is something to keep our eyes on. I recently re-read a paper by Charles Thorpe and Jane Gregory which takes a critical look at increased moves to public participation in science alongside commercial exploitation of scientific knowledge. That paper’s open access, but not the easiest read if you’re not of a sociological persuasion. If pragmatic examples are more your thing, it’s worth reading up on Brian Wynne’s resignation from a Food Standards Agency steering group or perhaps Gaia Vince’s story of when SEED magazine spiked one of her articles because it was critical of a potential advertiser on advertisers.

For me, a lot of this boils down to a lack of public debate over political and commercial of science itself, not just who pays for science museum exhibitions or advertises in science magazines. I think there should be more public discussion of science policy. We shouldn’t just be having debates about whether scientists and journalists have different views over what counts as “good” science media – or if this frame mises out the role of press officers or the public – but how we might involve policy makers and political activists more productively in the conversation too.

I can see why people worry if and how science media can clearly communicate scientific knowledge, but it should also open up questions about how science is made and what we want to do with it too. Here’s my final question: how can science media more effectively discuss commercial interests of science, rather than just being constrained by them?

Last month, Ed Davey, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, gave a speech about “climate security” (full text on DECC site)

Climate change is about increased risk: of extreme events, of natural disasters, of changes in weather patterns.

As our understanding of the climate grows, so does our understanding of what those risks might mean for our people.

Around the world, governments – and militaries – are planning for climate instability. From flood defences to foreign aid, climate security is part of the policy discussion.
But it’s not yet part of the public discussion.

And that’s something that we have to change.

We need to get people to engage with climate security; to understand what it means to be climate resilient in an interdependent world. Because at the moment, it’s too easy to discount the danger.

I’m all for getting the public more engaged with issues of climate change, but I’m also a bit sceptical about this move towards dubbing environmental policy issues matters of security. It’s not just climate. Everything seems to be about security these days: food, energy. I can see the advantages to this sort of framing, but I can also see downsides too. Maybe I’m wrong though, I’d be interested to hear what others think.

The term security feels, for me, a bit too focused on keeping things as they are, rather than questioning if it’s really what we should be doing in the first place. For example, someone asked me if I thought the badger cull counted as “food security”; it is supposed to be about protecting beef and dairy stock after all. I’d be appalled if tried to frame it as “food security” though. Even momentarily putting aside the large question mark over whether killing badgers will protect cows, I really doubt badgers are putting our ability to feed ourselves at risk, only parts of our economy, which is meaningful and terrible for many people involved, granted, but isn’t quite something I’d dub “food security”. In fact, I’m surprised more people aren’t using the badger cull to pose larger questions around the industrialisation of cows. There are all sorts of policies, technologies and cultural practises around food production that could be done differently, if we wanted to. Similarly, I worry that the frame of climate and energy security may be over used to quieten debate about how we currently use our natural resources.

Maybe I’m wrong though. As I said, I’d be interested to hear what others think.

Something I am more sure about is my disagreement with a line near the end of Davey’s speech, where he said we’d “proven ourselves equal to the challenge” for other global threats like nuclear war. Really? We’re all sorted on that one? You sure? Because last time I checked, the Cuban Missile Crisis was a while back, but we’re still spending a shed load of money on Trident. Being in a slightly playfully indigent mood, I put £134,565 (wage of a cabinet minister) into a “Where does my tax go?” interactive and it popped up with just under £9 a day on defence and a bit under £2.50 on the environment*. CND has a little viz to show ‘how many cuts does it take to pay for Trident’, if you like these sorts of things. Do keep your eye on the top left hand corner for the rolling red text letting you know how much the UK spent on nuclear weapons since you opened the page.

You can decide for yourself whether you think nuclear weapons are a good or bad thing. Personally, I’ve never been entirely 100% sure about my own stance on this. But don’t for a moment think they’ve gone away. If Davey feels there is added urgency now to finally really try to engage the UK public with “climate security”, I wonder if he could find some funds freed up for such important work in disarmament. I’m inclined to think we’ve got enough environmental “security” issues happening in the seas around Scotland right now without keeping a nuclear bomb there too.

* These are vague because the Telegraph tool wouldn’t let me put a specific figure in. I set it at an annual salary of £134,650 and got £8.97/day on defence and £2.46/day on the environment. If you want details of cabinet pay on the House of Commons FAQs (along with the PM, select committee heads and other non-pay related facts). You can find average pay of everyone else at the Office for National Statistics.